The Year of Magical Thinking (Vintage International)

for my inability to share or even in any real way to acknowledge, at the end, the pain and helplessness and physical humiliation they each endured.

the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.

I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.

If the dead were truly to come back, what would they come back knowing? Could we face them? We who allowed them to die?

since the last morning of 2003, the morning after he died, I had been trying to reverse time, run the film backward. It was now eight months later, August 30, 2004, and I still was.

“Obituary,” unlike “autopsy,” which was between me and John and the hospital, meant it had happened.

Visible mourning reminds us of death, which is construed as unnatural, a failure to manage the situation.

Were faith and grief the same thing? Were we unusually dependent on one another the summer we swam and watched Tenko and went to dinner at Morton’s? Or were we unusually lucky?

so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.